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On Tuesday, Prague City Hall unveiled new plans to banish prostitution from the capital’s streets. As of January 2008, prostitutes caught offering their services in Prague’s public spaces could face weighty fines, and will be banned from the area. But women’s groups have asked whether the City Hall’s new decree goes far enough.

Nikolka and Veronika, two baby girls accidentally swapped at birth, are now back with their biological parents. After an agonizing eight weeks their parents took the plunge and finally swapped back their children.

Inaccessibility to public places, the lack of barrier-free public transport, and discrimination at work and schools: these are some of the most frequent problems for disabled people living in the Czech Republic. These results follow from a survey recently commissioned by the National Council for the Disabled.

A crowd of some 2,000 teachers and other education employees held a noisy demonstration near the Education Ministry on Tuesday morning, on a day when more than half of the country’s schools closed their doors in a nationwide strike. Czech teachers are angry at what they say are insufficient pay rises in the planned 2008 education budget, pointing out that the average wage in the education sector has now fallen below the national average. Tuesday saw the appointment of a new Education Minister, Ondrej Liska, who appeared in front of the crowd and

Following the weekend, it is clear that nothing will now prevent a teachers’ strike from going ahead on Tuesday: acting Education Minister Martin Bursik and the candidate for the post, Ondrej Liska, tried to stave off the planned protest by pledging to improve conditions in the education sector, but it was too little, too late. The December 4th strike will go ahead. It has been estimated that at least half of the country’s schools will remain closed.

President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party clinched a landslide victory in parliamentary elections held in the Russian Federation on Sunday. In a reaction to the preliminary results, the Czech Foreign Ministry has denounced the elections as not providing a level playing field for all the country’s political forces, and said that doubts remain about their validity. Meanwhile, the Czech Republic’s left-wing parties have also questioned the Russian elections.

Politician’s perks are perceived as a problem in most countries, and there’s often a thin line between perks and abuse of power. In the Czech Republic, a country where for 40 years the communist big wigs did exactly as they wished without being held accountable for their actions, people are extremely sensitive to any form of abuse of power or position. And politicians are closely watched whether they happen to be skiing in the Alps or attending a football match.

Remember all the fuss a few weeks ago when a neo-Nazi group tried to march through the Jewish quarter on the anniversary of Kristallnacht? That march was prevented, but led to much discussion about the size and seriousness of the neo-Nazi threat in the Czech Republic. Now a leading Czech newspaper has claimed that neo-Nazis have managed to infiltrate the Czech Armed Forces, and has the evidence to prove it.

With the holiday season just around the corner, the traditional Prague Christmas market is due to open on Saturday in the historic centre of the Czech capital. Both visitors to Prague and locals can come to see what’s in store this year in Old Town Square and Wenceslas Square and sample some traditional Czech Christmas delicacies.

This Saturday marks World Aids Day, 26 years since the first case of HIV was discovered. The year 2007 has been the darkest for the Czech Republic so far, with the number of new HIV-patients for the first time exceeding one hundred. But despite the growing number of infected people the country still records one of the lowest figures of HIV-positive patients in Europe.